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Ecocriticism has tended to avoid modernist texts in favour of ones that make vivid, epiphanic reference to nature. Beckett's Endgame states, in common with some environmentalists, that "there's no more nature" - but refuses to reveal the dimensions of its absence. Reread as a precursor to ecocriticism, it is paradoxically the perfect play for the era of anxiety about climate change, which eludes both sensory apprehension and generic representation. Once you start to think the ecological thought, you can't unthink it: it's a sphincter - once it's open, there's no closing.
Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought
I. "Fini, c'est fini." ("Finished, it's finished.")1
CLOV: There's no more nature.
HAMM: No more nature! You exaggerate.
(Beckett 1958, 16)
For many Britons, the turning point was the film of a polar bear, seemingly unable to find sea ice on which to live, swimming out into the Arctic Ocean and death in the BBC series Planet Earth. For others, it was the 'hockey stick' graph of rocketing global C02 emissions and temperatures on A1 Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. For me it was something simple: seeing a rose in full bloom on an unseasonably warm New Year's Day, 2006. Even those who armour themselves in wilful ignorance or complacent scepticism have to scurry through torrential rains to the shelter of their car pursued by carping anxieties.
Besides its impacts on biodiversity, agriculture, Third World development and so on, climate change affects our sense of ourselves as a species as well. Thus Bill McKibben laments in The End of Nature that:
We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather. By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature's independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us. [...] A child bom now will never know a natural summer, a natural autumn, winter or spring. Summer is becoming extinct, replaced by something else which will be called 'summer'. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics - it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and will be the time when crops grow - but it will not be summer,...